My Paranoid Fantasy - M$ vs. OSS

[mod at std.com (Michael O'Donnell)]

If I were Bill the Gates and wanted to maximize FUD about OSS,
here's what I'd do:

 - Find somebody with no visible ties to M$; if they were
   (or at least were widely believed to be) an OSS advocate,
   so much the better.  Let's call him Sim^H^H^HCad.

 - Secretly provide Cad with a VERY large amount of money
   that's untraceable to M$.

 - I would then secretly organize a group whose sole purpose
   would be to perform an extreme in-depth analysis of some
   high-profile OSS package (eg. Linux) and gather a list
   of latent bugs in that product, sorted by seriousness.
   I'd need to have a first choice and several alternates, as
   any given bug might be fixed at any time by one or more
   of the OSS movement's thousands of distributed maintainers.

 - Cad would then fund a business venture, some enterprise whose
   pivotal, mission-critical technology depended on the OSS
   package in question.  With enough money spent on marketing
   and promotion it would have a decent chance of success.
   Alternatively, Cad might be able to simply purchase such
   an enterprise outright.

 - In the meantime, I would have been making damned sure that
   the corresponding M$ package did NOT suffer from anything
   even resembling the bug in question.

 - At the properly orchestrated moment, Cad would arrange to
   trigger the bug in question, carefully arranging things
   such that the consequences were maximally damaging to his
   enterprise and pissing off the maximum number of customers
   in high-profile, widely publicized fashion.

 - I would then jump up and down, beating my drum about OSS
   and the terrible risks inherent in "amateur" software and,
   oh-by-the-way, here's the corresponding M$ package that is
   absolutely bulletproof WRT the problem in question.

With any luck (and I'd be capable of purchasing rather more than
my share of luck) the press would fail to mention the speed with
which the fix for the bug in question got implemented and deployed
by the OSS community...

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